FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE      October 6, 2005

 

 

The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project (CLMP) will hold its annual public forum on Saturday, November 5, starting at 7 PM at the Mateel Community Center in Redway. The following speakers will appear on a panel and take questions from the audience:

 

Alexander Cockburn, The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist and one of America's best-known radical journalists, was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland. He graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature and language.

 

A permanent resident of the United States since 1973, Cockburn wrote for many years for The Village Voice about the press and politics. Since then he has contributed to many publications including The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and The Wall Street Journal (where he had a regular column from 1980 to 1990), as well as alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

 

Cockburn has written "Beat the Devil" since 1984, and also contributes a nationally syndicated column to the Los Angeles Times. He has published numerous books, including The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (with Susanna Hecht); Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (with Jeffrey St. Clair) and Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond (2001). Cockburn lives in Petrolia and co-edits the newsletter CounterPunch.

 

David Cobb was the Green Party nominee for President in 2004 and called for a recount of the vote in Ohio. He served as the General Counsel for the U.S. Green Party until declaring his candidacy, and was the Green Party of Texas (GPTX) candidate for Attorney General in 2002.

 

Raised in the small shrimping village of San Leon, Texas, Cobb was a construction worker for several years before attending college. He graduated from the University of Houston Law School in 1993 and worked in the Public Interest Law Clinic. Cobb had a successful law practice until early 2000, when Ralph Nader asked him to manage the Green Party effort in Texas. He coordinated the ballot access drive that collected over 76,000 signatures in 75 days and broadened the number of GPTX chapters from 4 to 26.

 

Cobb serves on the Steering Committee of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, a citizen's group dedicated to contesting the corporate usurpation of our Constitution and our government.

 

Carolyn Crnich was elected Humboldt County recorder in 1990 and subsequently became Humboldt’s elected Clerk-Recorder. In 2003, the county elections department was moved under her purview. Crnich has been actively involved in local efforts to implement the federal Help Americans Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), which requires a means by which disabled voters can vote in unassisted fashion by 2006. Crnich attended hearings of the California Secretary of State’s Voting Systems and Procedures Panel that covered, among other issues related to touch screen voting throughout the state, Diebold Election Systems, Inc.’s installation of a last-minute, uncertified software patch to their machines in Alameda county. Diebold paid a $2.6 million settlement in the case after Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed suit against the company last year. Humboldt County currently uses Diebold voting machines.

 

Ann Harrison is a freelance journalist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Alternet.org, among others, covering civil rights, medical marijuana, and privacy issues. She recently gave a presentation titled, “Medical Cannabis Data Raids: A Security Case Study” at "What The Hack," a computer hacking conference in Boxtel, Netherlands. She is currently working on a story about CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting). Some of Harrison’s work can be seen at http://www.ontherecord.org/blog/ and at http://www.alternet.org/authors/1222/

 

Mark Schlosberg has served for the last four years as Police Practices Policy Director for the ACLU of Northern California. In this capacity, he has worked on a variety of policing issues including racial profiling, accountability systems, surveillance, crowd management, and use of force. He was on the legal team that reached a landmark racial profiling settlement agreement with the California Highway Patrol and managed the successful 2003 ballot campaign to strengthen the San Francisco oversight system. He recently completed a report on the use of tasers. 

 

Prior to working at the ACLU, Schlosberg worked as a deputy public defender at the Contra Costa Public Defender Office and was Vice Chair of the Berkeley Police Review Commission. Schlosberg received his law degree from New York University School of Law.

 

KMUD Radio personality Fred-in-the-Hills will emcee the event, and Francine Allen will provide musical entertainment. The Bonnie Blackberry Civil Liberties Award will be presented and the lucky winner of this year’s Win-A-Trip raffle will be drawn. The forum is free to the public; donations are appreciated. Doors open at 6:30 PM with $10 lasagna dinners, drinks and desserts available.

 

For more information, contact CLMP at 923-4646.

 

 

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